The iconic color portrait of the Mercury Seven, NASA's first astronauts , in their silver spacesuits, July 1960

Vintage chromogenic print on fiber-based paper, printed 1962, with "A KODAK PAPER" watermark on verso, numbered "NASA S-62-8774" in black in top margin (NASA MSC), 20,3 x 25,4 cm, a few pinholes in the margin

Possibly the most famous portrait of any astronaut crew, extremely rare in color

Project Mercury’s purpose was to send the first man into space. It was unknown whether humans could survive space travel and the Seven immediately became national heroes.

Front row, left to right: Walter Schirra, Donald “Deke” Slayton, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter; back row, left to right: Alan Shepard, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and Gordon Cooper.

“The Mercury capsule which will some day carry an Astronaut into orbit is more than just a marvelously engineered vehicle for space flight. It must also be a home away from home, capable of producing and sustaining an atmosphere in which a man can live and breathe comfortably and work efficiently. My special interest and responsibility for the past year has been the development of these "life support" or "environmental control" systems. To me, the most interesting of them all is the pressure suit which the Astronaut will wear into space. Basically the suit is a tailored rubber bag. a man-shaped balloon, and it is our last-ditch protection against disaster. It will be worn throughout the mission, but it need not be sealed and inflated at all times in the pressurized capsule. However, if the capsule, orbiting in the vacuum of space, springs a leak during flight and the pressure takes a big drop, delicate barometric sensors will discover it immediately and signal the Astronaut to close his helmet's face plate. The suit becomes sealed and inflates automatically. In effect the Astronaut is then wearing his own oxygen-conditioned, pressurized cabin.”
Walter Schirra (LIFE magazine, 1 August 1960, p. 36)

Read more: The Right Stuff: When America Met the Mercury Astronauts by Ben Cosgrove for TIME magazine (http://time.com/3879356/mercury-seven-photos-of-nasa-astronauts-in-training/).

Literature:
LIFE, 1 August 1960, p. 37; Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon, Reynolds, pp. 38-39; Space: A History of Space Exploration in Photographs, Chaikin, p. 40.